Recent Innovation for Concrete Highway Bridges

A new generation of concrete highway bridges has recently been built in Canada using new design concepts and advanced materials for reinforcing and prestressing concrete . This paper describes briefly the design and construction of three bridges. The first smart concrete highway bridge (Centre Street, Beddington Bridge, Calgary, Alberta) is prestressed by carbon fiber reinforced plastic (CFRP) tendons and instrumented by fiber optical sensors. The second bridge is the Salmon River Bridge in Halifax, Nova Scotia, where a reinforcing steel-free concrete deck slab was constructed based on the research work conducted at the Technical University of Nova Scotia . The paper also describes the design and the development of a new bridge in Manitoba using straight and draped CFRP tendons for prestressing the girder, CFRP stirrups for shear reinforcement. CFRP for flexural reinforcement of the deck slab and GFRP for the bridge curbs. All bridges are instrumented with a new generation of optical fiber sensors monitored remotely from a central station through telephone lines, thereby eliminating the need for costly site inspections. 'Professor of Civil Engineering , President of ISIS Canada Network of Centres of Excellence and Vice President of the ACMBS Network of Canada, University of Manitoba,Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, R3T 5V6. 2Professor of Civil Engineering , Vice President of ISIS Canada Network of Centres of Excellence, President of the ACMBS Network of Canada, and Director of the Nova Scotia CAD/CAM Centre, Technical University of Nova Scotia, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, B3J 2X4.